Worth the Candle Chapter 194 - Coda II

I had no idea what the fuck Tommul would make of this particular scene, but one thing was very clear, which was that we were a mile up in the air. It had been a while since I’d done any serious math, but I was pretty sure that a mile was higher than the three hundred feet that the Sky Treaty said I was supposed to stay under.

“Go away!” I scread at Tommul, amplified by vibration magic. He was approaching very, very fast. Dragons had best-in-class abilities, which included vision, and I had known that Tommul had been in the area, but still, it felt so fucking unfair. “Go away!” I scread again, putting the full force of my magic into it, “Go away, he’ll kill you!” but fuck, I wouldn’t have believed either.

Even with how fast he was approaching, I had thought that Tommul would stop and talk, but no, he let loose with dragonfire as soon as he was within range.

The Space Plate I was wearing was supposed to protect against environntal effects, but whatever it would have done in a hot desert, it did very little against the dragonfire, even with my using still magic, even with a blast of vibration to try to disperse it. It wasn’t just screaming hot, but also clung to whatever it touched, like a worse version of napalm. I was covered in the stuff, the pain faint from my modifications but present, and did the only thing that I could do, which was to draw healing from my bones and then slap at Alvion’s Vambrace to get a change of armor. All at once I was in the Gardner’s Plate, an ink magic sword at my hip along with a shield that I had borrowed from Rosemallow, but the Vambrace itself was still coated in dragonfire, and it was searing hot. I used the sword to cut the straps, cutting my own skin in the process, and let the lting pieces of red-hot tal fall. It had burned my arm, on top of all the other burns that I’d suffered inside the armor. Whatever protection the Space Plate had offered , it hadn’t been enough.

Unfortunately, paper bags are flammable, even when exposed to completely normal fire.

The Cannibal had fallen when I’d stopped supporting him, but he’d grabbed onto my foot at the last second, and used it to launch himself up, climbing . I tried to still him, but of course that didn’t work, and he reared back for a punch at my kneecap. I used the Ring of Partial Incorporeality, part of the new set of gear, and made my whole leg incorporeal, which lost him his grip and made the punch whiff. He began falling again, and I wondered whether that was a legitimate weakness, whether he actually couldn’t fly. But I supposed there were hundreds of people down there to kill, thousands, depending on how large his range would end up being.

Tommul ca back for a second pass, his three hundred feet of wingspan the biggest thing in the air. I wasn’t confident that incorporeality would actually protect , because it worked through interaction with the ethereal plane, not just by making intangible. Could dragonfire extend into the ethereal? I had no idea.

I had no real way of killing a dragon. The best bet would be a blood spear that gave access to his bones, which I would burn to weaken him and power myself, the sa trick I’d used against Mo Rath, but dragons had so natural magic resistances and immunities, and fuck if I thought a blood spear would actually be able to penetrate him even if that wasn’t the case.

Scratch that, I did have one thing that could kill the dragon, and he was falling away from .

I stopped stilling myself and began to drop, which happened really really fast given that there was no air in the ethereal plane (I was holding my breath), and no friction to slow . Tommul went into a dive, and as fast as I was dropping, like a stone in a vacuum, he was moving faster. I was sure to out-accelerate him given ti, but I didn’t have that ti.

I passed the Cannibal after about ten seconds had passed, a little less than halfway to the ground. I tried to twist around and see what was happening, mostly so I could defend against it, but it was nearly impossible with my body fully incorporeal, until I managed to still only part of my body, which sent spinning. From there, trying to orient myself was a struggle, and I caught only glimpses of the battle happening above , a gout of gold fire so fierce and so bright that it nearly blinded , far more intense than before.

When my eyes started functioning again, I brought myself to a complete stop, hoping that the two of them would fall right past and impact sowhere in the city, allowing to get as far away as possible. Instead, I turned to look from my awkward angle and saw them above , Tommul flapping his wings erratically to keep at a constant altitude.

Shia LaBeouf was on fire and punching a gold dragon in the face.

Tommul let out another gout of golden fla, and I squeezed my eyes shut tight and turned away. The dragonfire had done nothing, because the Cannibal was on top of Tommul’s head, his arm up to the shoulder in Tommul’s eye. Tommul scread in pain, and clawed frantically at the Cannibal, opening up wounds, but not as deep as they should have been, given that Tommul’s claws were fucking enormous, each of them twice the size of the Cannibal. Having completely fucked up Tommul’s eye, the Cannibal landed a single solid punch to his head, and the frantic flapping of wings half as large as a football field suddenly stopped as Tommul began to fall from the sky. The Cannibal rode him for a few seconds, then kicked off with incredible superhuman power, sailing through the air, right at .

I dropped, trying to move out of his way, wishing that I still had the Ring of Upward Bliss, but it was part of the other outfit, and that was tucked away inside Alvion’s Vambrace, which last I’d seen was falling half a mile to the ground while soaked in dragonfire. (So much fucking lost if it really was gone for good, but not remotely the ti to think about it.) I kept myself fully incorporeal and prayed that it would be enough.

For a mont, I really thought that it would be. The Cannibal went straight through , but when he wasn’t overlapping anymore, he grabbed by the wrist. I pulled out my sword with my other hand and began whacking away at him. It was an ink magic creation, one that was supposed to build in power with every hit, but it was fucking worthless, because every wound on the Cannibal was a surface wound.

He grappled with , twisted the arm that he was holding onto, and bit down on my wrist, chomping right through the tal of the Gardner’s Plate as though it weren’t even there. It was a sacrifice that I was willing to make, if it would keep him busy for even a few seconds.

“I liked Holes!” I scread at him, not really out of any plan, but because it was what ca to mind. He continued on eating my wrist, and I decided to play what cards I had.

I let us drop, completely incorporeal. Without drag, there was no terminal velocity, just pure acceleration, and in a matter of seconds, as he ate my arm, we were going really fucking fast. I waited until we were perilously close to the ground, flung out the tendrils of Gardner’s Plate to help put him facing the ground, then put us back to corporeality. We slamd into a wall of air, which dislodged him, and I pushed still magic as hard as I could. He lost his grip and fell to the ground at speed, surprising with a crack of bones as he hit. But he wasn’t there for more than half a second before he got up and limped away with the sa intense determination that he’d shown before.

Quite a bit of my right hand was missing, much of the at around my wrist completely gone, and my fingers only staying on by a little bit. The Ring of Incorporeality was missing. I pushed healing into the wound as I got to my feet, but I was missing bone, and huge missing chunks of flesh would take too much ti and resources, so I just did enough to stop the bleeding.

I landed on top of the building we’d fallen on, which as it turned out was Greychapel. As I looked over, I saw that a huge portion of the building was caved in, because Tommul had dropped like a rock and smashed right into the building. Normally that kind of thing wouldn’t be a problem, because velocity wards would stop sothing going that hard and fast, the sa way they would stop other kinds of aerial bombardnt, but dragons had powerful magic resistance, and that applied to wards as much as it did to anything else.

And normally caving in a building would be pretty terrible, but caving in one that was packed to the gills with extradinsional space? That was on a different level of urban calamity. Where Greychapel had crunched in, whole rooms had spilled out the sides, and the internal wreckage of the primary legislative building of Anglecynn had barfed out into the surrounding streets, filling them up with walls, floors, tables, chairs, cabinets, and (I was sure) bodies. Tommul himself was visible as a wing sticking up out of hole he’d made when he slamd into the building.

The Cannibal’s modus operandi was becoming more clear: attack, eat, get fought off, go find other prey, except that so people would just die from his first attack, because not everyone could survive losing a limb. It wasn’t quite horror movie logic, but it was close, and by that reckoning, I had a bit of ti, minutes, let’s say, maybe more given the sheer number of victims that the Cannibal was likely to go after. With everything that Amaryllis had told , it would probably be everyone in the War Room when his na had been invoked, and maybe everyone in Greychapel.

If I was being really cynical, that might give more ti.

Unfortunately, ‘ti for what’ was a complete fucking mystery. Ti to find another paper bag, ti to heal my wounds, ti to reset my bones, or to regroup with the others. They had all been in the upper half of the War Room, or maybe coming down the stairs, which ant that they were potential targets.

I tried ink magic and then gave up. What I needed was a magic item that could manipulate a paper bag onto soone’s head, but ink magic worked best when you approached a problem from the side, making items that could solve your intended problems as though they weren’t designed to do that. If you needed a wooden stake to kill a vampire, then a gun that fired wooden stakes was an incredibly la and uncreative way to do that, and in ink magic terms, that ant a crappy product that would last you a single use before crumpling, if that. And to make an entad that could accomplish ‘put a paper bag on a specific soone’s head’ was really, really hard to approach from the side. I gave up after about a minute, not wanting to waste ti when I didn’t know how much ti I had. I was sure that it would co to later, the perfect elegant entad to design that would only obviously be the solution in context.

I took off across the roof, trying to formulate a plan. The paper bag thing had fucking worked, as idiotic as it was, all I needed was to do it a second ti and not have a fucking dragon appear from nowhere to ruin everything. (But ‘from nowhere’ in the sense that every report of Tommul being overhead was now obvious foreshadowing for that single mont.)

I didn’t have a firm grasp on the layout of Greychapel, so I simply ran over to the hole that Tommul had made and jumped down, using still magic to keep from breaking a leg. I ended up in a room that had been half pushed out when the star magic had failed and the extradinsional stuff had co undone, but after I’d gone past the door, everything looked more or less fine. I started running, looking into various rooms I passed, hoping that I would find a paper bag sowhere, hoping that wherever the Cannibal was, there would be so screaming that I could use to find him. Vibration magic was dialed up, but I heard nothing.

I saw a door with frosted glass, and stopped to open it when a thought occurred to . I was hoping that there would be a trash can. Aerb didn’t have plastics, which ant no plastic bags, which ant that people used paper liners or paper bags instead, and I was praying that it would be close enough by whatever standards the Cannibal operated under.

Unfortunately, standing behind the door was forr child actor Shia LaBeouf, breathing hard and with blood sared around his mouth (the other blood that had soaked him before, mysteriously missing). We stared at each other for a fraction of a second, and then he went for , moving in low and trying to bite. I had exhausted every attack I had, and lost my sword in the fall, so I tried to go over him, hoping that I could get into the room and find so salvation there.

He tried to grab by the leg as I jumped over his lunge, and I tried passion magic to give extra speed and avoid his grip, but this ti it didn’t work, and he clutched my left knee, bringing to the ground. With a squeeze, he shattered my kneecap, the armor there, the muscles, and everything else, shearing the leg entirely with the force of his grip, and I was hoping that would give the ti I needed. I flopped into the office, leaving my leg behind, and went under the desk that was just inside, hoping against hope that there was a trash can there.

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There was, and I grabbed it, heart hamring in my chest. I dumped out the papers inside and grabbed the bag, barely able to hold onto it with my wounded hand, turning back toward the Cannibal and praying that he wouldn’t just tear it from , because if he did, then I was fucked. My bad hand went to the mo bone on my bandolier, praying that it would work, that I could maneuver the bag with only one hand.

Instead, I turned back toward the door and saw nothing. He was gone, and my leg with him, nothing but a ss of blood where he’d handicapped . I couldn’t hear him, and my hearing was really good.

Twenty seconds later saw limping along down the hallway of Greychapel, using a vine from the Gardner’s Plate as a makeshift prosthetic that wasn’t going to last very long. I had a paper bag in hand, and another one that was folded up and tucked into the belt that held my sheath. From what I had seen, there were literally paper bags in every single room of Greychapel, but I knew that the Cannibal would be back for , because that was how these things worked. Eventually I wouldn’t have enough body parts to keep going, or I would run out of bones for healing, and then I would die.

Eventually I did hear screaming. I had figured out a strategy of rotating the vines from the Gardner’s Plate, keeping them fresh by only using one at a ti, and it was a mostly functional way to walk. I tried to keep in mind the horror movie rules, how every door could contain him, how he would jump out from the shadows when I least expected it. That was built into the ga of ACSLB as a fundantal rule. The Cannibal being right behind the door I opened? That was a classic Shia Surprise.

I reached the room with all the screaming through a side door, and saw a concentrated offensive being torn apart by the Cannibal, piece by piece. It was an enormous room, and eventually I realized that it was the titular chapel of Greychapel, a place used for public assemblies and grand speeches rather than any religious observations. It would have been a dizzyingly large room, at a certain point in my life, but I had spent quite a bit of ti in a house with a flair for the grandiose.

There were dozens of people involved in the fight, and dozens dead. Specialists must have been brought in, because there were way more people in armor than there had been in the War Room, and I hadn’t had a good view of the upper balcony, but I was pretty sure that it hadn’t been composed of specialists. I had no idea what the fuck they thought they were going to do about it, but it was very possible that they didn’t know what they were going up against, because they might have been pointed at the problem without proper intel. The Cannibal was ripping through them, tanking all the fancy entads and high-powered magic that Anglecynn could bring to bear. So of them montarily worked, but they would stop after a mont, just enough to let soone escape with a grievous wound, or as a distraction. There was at least one revision mage at work, undoing damage, but there were limits. The Cannibal could shrug off any damage, blow through any ward, and fully negate anything from still magic to revision.

I watched a woman in shimring, inky black armor slip forward. It was Pallida, wielding her trident in one hand, a brown paper bag in the other. I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t operating on her own, but I hoped it ant that the others were alive and well sowhere in the lee. I saw Pallida move on the Cannibal, using soone else’s attack as a distraction. She almost managed to slip the bag over his head, but he ducked down, moving blisteringly fast, and elbowed her in the stomach, which sent her flying backward. There wasn’t even a mont’s pause before he launched himself across the room to where a cluster of people had been aiming ranged weapons at him.

“Use the fucking paper bags!” I heard Amaryllis scream at the top of her lungs, her voice amplified so hard that I hoped she wasn’t deafening the people next to her. She was unard (and still missing an arm), but trying to direct forces that she had no business directing was going about as well as you’d expect, especially when the thing she was trying to get them to do was so clearly stupid. It was actually so stupid that I probably would have listened to her, on the theory that no one would say sothing so stupid unless there was a good reason, but maybe I would have been like everyone else and ignored her.

I rushed forward, limping, trying ineffectually to use blood magic to speed along my steps, which didn’t work so well with only one leg, since the vine I was using as my left leg couldn’t quite keep up. I had three of the mo bones on my backup bandolier, and that would allow a brief window of ti, assuming that the first ti it had worked wasn’t just because it was novel. My working theory was that because the Cannibal was a , then maybe he was especially vulnerable to an anti, because that was just stupid enough to make sense within the frawork of this whole stupid thing.

Anglecynn was bringing out the big guns, I had to give them that. I saw soone holding what I thought was probably one of the portal rings from that ti my group had killed Dracula, and it was rapidly pushing out a wide variety of magic, from what I assud was a well-prepared site so miles away. It was all worthless, naturally, and in so cases, completely at odds with what I knew to be the winning approach, because those pulses of magic that ca out of the portals ant that lee only got their chance when there was a break in firing.

I waited until just such a break, one caused by the Cannibal launching himself at a massed group of people who were clearly trying their best to act as support or artillery, and pushed myself harder to get there.

Amaryllis had been among the crowd that the Cannibal landed in, and she caught sight of as she ran from him. She was still dressed for Court, rather than for battle, her dress bloodied, her body much worse for the wear. She must have caught a head wound at so point, because half of her face was covered in blood, and one of her eyes was shut.

“Get him,” she shouted to as I hobbled my way over.

I waited until I thought I was close enough, then started burning a unicorn bone, touching it in the bandolier with my maid hand. I had no idea whether it would actually provide any benefit, but fuck if I didn’t have to try.

The amount of firepower being directed on the Cannibal was way, way too much, and it was stopping him from feeding, which was one of the only things that actually slowed him down. In a perfect world, they would only have been trying new attacks after seeing certain approaches fail, but we were far from a perfect world.

I did my best to see the attacks coming and get out of the way, but everyone was getting as lethal as they could get, and when the Cannibal killed a rune mage that had been powering up a green beam weapon, it lanced through the air, slicing through and a few others.

Dying wasn’t quite an old hat, but I’d been burning my way through the unicorn’s bones for quite a while now, and I was used to utterly failing and having to reset.

What I wasn’t used to was things being different. No, this ti when things reset, the Cannibal stopped what he was doing and looked at . It all went differently from there, because he didn’t go for the rune mage, he went for .

I had the bag ready, unfolded, and waited until the last possible mont to start burning the mo bone (my hand positioned so that one finger was on the unicorn bone, one on the mo bone, with the fingers I had left). All at once, the Cannibal stopped what he was doing, and there wasn’t a mont of hesitation before he moved on to the next person in his field of view. I bounded after him, hampered by the vine leg, and was just about to slide the paper bag down over his head with my free hand when I got blasted with a beam of green.

That fucking rune mage had killed , though in so sense I couldn’t bla him, because he literally couldn’t have known I was there. I tried the sa route again, waiting for the Cannibal to approach , this ti circling to the left in order to get him closer to his eventual target. I burned the sa mo bone again, and this ti, held the paper bag in my mouth for just long enough that I could pull out my returning dagger and chuck it right at the rune mage, bonking him in the head hard enough to give him second thoughts about the attack he was charging up.

As soon as I slipped the bag over the Cannibal’s head, he stopped what he was doing. I took my finger off the mo bone, but kept burning the unicorn bone, trying to squeak one last second out of it in case soone fucked this up for . I yelled for good asure, “Stop! He’s contained!”, knowing that it was ridiculous.

The unicorn bone had reached its limit, and I let the loop end. mories of parallel tilines ca rushing back to everyone around , and I prayed that no one would shoot at the Cannibal, that no one had explosives ready and waiting to go, that nothing would fuck this up. But by the rule of three —

Two things happened in quick succession. The first was that twenty people in Imperial-standard matte grey shimrplate appeared around the chapel, each of them fully ard. The second was that the side of the chapel crashed open, stained glass raining down, as an enormous one-eyed gold dragon stuck his head in. For just a mont I could see a golden fla at the back of his throat, but he stopped, closing his mouth and simply staring.

Compared to the earlier roar of battle, there was relative silence, just pieces of building falling down, the cries of the injured, and people speaking quickly to each other.

“It’s stupid,” I said, amplifying my voice as much as I could. “It’s really fucking stupid, but if the bag cos off his head, he’ll kill every fucking person here, whether you teleport out or hide in extradinsional space. This is literally the only way, it is very, very dumb, but I swear that it’s true.”

Tommul looked like he was going to roast , or to make so threat, but after a huff of air from his nose, which swept warm air over all of us, he retracted his head and took off, the sound and wind of his wings rattling the windows.

“Finch!” I yelled, looking around, trying to see the gno that I was certain had co in with the shimrplate goons.

Figaro Finch stepped out from behind a pew, with none of the dust, blood, and gore that everyone else had on them. “How sure are you that this will hold?” he asked .

“Eighty percent,” I replied. “Maybe less.”

“And how in the holy fuck did you know it would work?” asked Finch. He was giving the stink eye, like this whole thing was my fault. I heard murmurs from the crowd, which with every passing minute looked less and less like they would fuck this up.

“We have this guy back on Earth,” I said, gesturing at Shia LaBeouf. “If I thought so asshole would be dumb enough to summon him, I would have been shouting it loud and wide. Not that anyone would have believed .” Not that I’d had any confidence in this particular solution.

“We’ll take him,” said Finch.

“Who are you?” asked a voice from among the fighters. It was a guy that I recognized almost entirely from his bucket of shurikens, and whose na I had forgotten, but it was either Basil, Heath, or Aster.

“Imperial Affairs, Uniquities Division,” said Finch. “And we’ll be taking him for containnt.”

“By the hells you will,” said Shuriken Bucket, stepping forward. It didn’t look like the Cannibal had gotten him, because he still had all his parts. “This isn’t an imperial matter.”

I was getting nervous. I’d gotten a quest — albeit one with no text — and then no update. That ant there was still a chance this could go sour, a way for soone to let the cat out of the bag, as it were.

“If he ever gets out, we’re fucked,” I said. “Best guess, he’s got a list of people who need killing, and the more ti passes, the further those people get from each other, which ans expected fatalities increase, because other people get in the way. Almost all of the people he wants to kill are Anglish, and a fair number are nobles.” I looked at Finch. “Have you ever contained anything like this before?”

“No,” he replied. “It’s still our jurisdiction.”

“Then you exercise caution and trap him in the deepest, darkest hole that you can find,” I said. “You put on extra bags for protection, you trap him in quickset goo,” I was hoping that was a thing, “you send him into the future, you do everything in your power to keep him from ever having that bag taken off his head.”

“The Empire doesn’t have jurisdiction here,” said Shuriken Bucket, moving toward , then taking a look at the naked man with a bag over his head that was standing next to , and coming up short. “It’s Anglecynn that’s at risk. It’s Anglecynn that should handle containnt.”

Fuck off, I thought. “Did Amaryllis tell you proper protocol?” I asked.

Shuriken Bucket (who I was thinking was probably Heath) hesitated. “She did, but —”

“And did you see people running straight at the hyperviolent, invincible cannibal with a paper bag, trying to get one on his head?” I asked. I changed out which vine was holding up, trying not to let that break my montum.

“Yes,” he said, gritting his teeth. I didn’t know if he was in charge, if there was anyone in charge, but he certainly seed to be speaking for the others.

“But you weren’t making a concerted effort to do what you were told,” I said. “The reason that I’m giving this force of pure destruction over to Uniquities instead of to anyone in this governnt is that I can trust Uniquities to do what it’s told and to take threats seriously,” I said. “Right now, you don’t have that trust.”

“You’re a mber of this Court,” said Shuriken Bucket taking another step toward . “We aren’t losing control of this weapon. We aren’t putting the safety of what remains of the War Council into the hands of the Empire.”

“Hyacinth did this,” I spat at him, “If it’s in the hands of the councils, you know that there’s still risk. Soone will look at a manifest of everyone who was in the vicinity and think about whether or not to pull the trigger. That’s how the Court works, Heath,” really hoping that I wasn’t wrong about which cousin he was, “People make their calculations based on their personal interests, and fuck anyone who gets in the way. Say what you want about the Empire, but at least it makes an effort to stick to its principles.”

Part of that was just fueled by misplaced anger, and I wasn’t wholly convinced that anything I’d said about the Empire was actually true, especially given the things that Raven had said to Finch, and the covert shit that I knew for a fact Uniquities got up to. But Heath didn’t call out on it, he only shrank back slowly, and gave a slow nod to Figaro Finch.

The n and won in shimrplate took so ti in approaching. I was sure that so or all of them were mages, and I was also sure that it was no coincidence that they showed up after all the fighting was done. They handled the Cannibal gingerly, double-bagged him, and then warped him out, leaving only Figaro Finch behind.

Quest Complete: Where’s the Beef? - You have successfully captured Emmy award winner Shia LaBeouf in a paper bag, from which he will never escape, unless he does.

“This is a shitshow,” he said to , speaking under his breath.

“We need to start bottling the dead,” said Amaryllis, her voice raised and amplified. “We need search and rescue, and we need dical. Anyone able-bodied should be helping with those efforts. Heath, you’re in charge of the bottling, Grak —” there was a mont of honest fear as she looked around, trying to find him, but Grak stepped out from a doorway, quite so distance from where the action was, “— Grak, you’re coordinating search and rescue, and Aster, you’re on dical.”

For a mont, I really thought that soone was going to ask her who had put her in charge, but no one spoke up, and after a brief pause, everyone who hadn’t already been dealing with the dead or wounded began to move into action.